The jungle was moist like a cloud of smoke. It was dark and sooty and overrun with the absence of people. Why the jungle was empty of them no one knew. Most of those who remembered were gone, and if they were not, they would not speak. The jungle was not theirs, and so they would not enter.
On the outskirts of the woven plants, where the trees were spaced and the thick vines gave way to pastures, was as close as the people of the valley dared to settle. It was as though the jungle had forgotten how to grow downhill and hovered above the grassy, sloping plain. Its presence in the valley was heavy, and it resembled fear, but the jungle was sleeping.
Streams slithered their way into the valley, but they were not for drinking. They held the jungle’s dormant poison. Harvesting these streams cost those people who would pay what they were not willing to spend, so they let them run walled off from the children and crossed with bridges so that the valley looked like a patchwork of grass and wood.
The people of the valley still needed water for drinking and for baths, however, as well as wood and the general supplies it took to go on living in  a secluded little valley surrounded by the strangling hand of plant life that grew through soot and ash. The water could be harvested from higher up on the mountain, where the jungle stopped growing trees. The fruit and lumber could be harvested from these outskirts as well, because the thin air diluted the poison.
And because those who went to collect their precious gems didn’t remember why they stayed out of the jungle, as far as they were concerned, that jungle and its food and its trees and even all of its poisoned streams were theirs, and so they went, and so they entered. And drunk on every one of their victories, they couldn’t hear the jungle’s silent, bitter screams.
They came back from the jungle towing their haul out through the trees, snapping branches and tearing vines. Though their bags and buckets were full, in their arms and their hands lay more fruit than they could carry, which they had plucked from limbs gleefully bending at the weight of their bounty, willing to share, but not with them.
Trails worn by countless sacks dragged down the valley embraced this next batch in unwilling arms. They led the feet and bags that had travelled this way so many times before to the center of the valley where logs with their ends buried completely in either side of the sloping valley formed a platform over the mightiest of the streams for the fruit to be unveiled.
Like greedy rats far from starving, once the fruits tumbled out of their fabric prisons, the people of the valley swarmed the mound regardless of the fact that expeditions were launched before the prior had returned. Only the adults swarmed this fruit, for these adults who didn’t remember why the jungle wasn’t theirs were the only ones who came. Their children and those stuck between childhood and adulthood were kept in the dark.
They were passed across the bridges while the adults’ aged noses were held in the air. They were kept from the fruit collections, and their words, spoken or otherwise, carried weight only when they fell on each others’ ears. The adults who heard stripped them of their meaning, because, after all, what could children know.
And in their frenzy, as they disregarded the latter generation on the paths and on the bridges, the adults didn’t hear jungle’s screams, and they didn’t notice the jungle waking up.
Vines, broken and dazed, twisted quietly and slowly out of their bitter sleep. The trees groaned and creaked as they took the inventory of what they had lost to strangers, to thieves. There was a time when these trees had shared with all, when these trees were few. But those murderers, those monsters had stolen more than their share, had killed more than their share.
These trees, this plant life, had taken back what the animals couldn’t. They had taken back what was theirs.
And they would take it again.
Every time, those launched on their expeditions to the jungle’s poles on the mountain were oblivious to the waking jungle. They were oblivious to how every time they snapped a twig or ripped an unsuspecting vine, the jungle felt it, it tensed.
Every time they stole from the branches or dragged through buckets of water from sentimental streams, the jungle awakened.
Those vines had been creeping closer to the pastures beyond the spaced trees. And even though their charge took decades, they would come, and its impact would be great. They would not stop until their swords of thorns and leafy blades impaled flesh as they had before. These vines remembered the towers and the windows, they remembered how they grew around those artificial trees. And they remembered how they cracked the concrete. And now they dominated. Now this world was theirs, and they would not let if fall to these things.
Again.
The adults, drunk on their aspiration for more, took no notice as they ran for their fruit, past the houses so overgrown that they were no longer recognizable as anything other than part of the jungle.
The children , however, who played where the jungle swept into these reserved pastures, noticed their space diminish. But their words to the adults fell on deaf ears. The disregarded children were told to ignore what was there, but year after year, as the jungle’s supply of fruit began to lose its ability to fill stretching bellies, the children grew.
But they were not old, and they would not be listened to.
When the children were adolescents, and the adolescents were still too young to be heard, the vines overtook the huts on the outskirts of the valley, as they had taken the cities centuries before. Then, they thought, then it was real. And the adults saw, and the young thought that they had won. But the adults, like they had before, disregarded them despite all evidence.
These adults would be gone before the full force of the jungle’s advance. They would not feel the impact of the jungle’s slow charge, so they did not care. They would not stop. They forced those children up on choking horses that were not theirs to meet this charge unarmed.
Their ignorance would end their world, and they didn’t care. So long as they got out, anything could die at their feet. These flames would be fanned around their children, these monsters stashed under weeping cheeks, hiding beneath undug graves. But if times were good now, they didn’t care about then.
This youth forced to take the brunt of this suicide would have nowhere to run, and the jungle would make them burn for all their parents had done.